The University of Wisconsin Oshkosh general education program has, in a lot of ways, changed Tracy Slagter as an educator—and many others around campus as well.
“I am just so amazed at how the University Studies Program (USP) has changed pretty much everything I do—my research trajectory, the way I teach, the way I interact with undergraduate students,” said Slagter, USP director and political science professor at UW Oshkosh.
USP is UW Oshkosh’s general education program. It was launched in 2013. With the start of the fall 2015 semester, the program is now in year three and is fully implemented at UW Oshkosh, Slagter said.
The program is UW Oshkosh’s innovative way of delivering general education. It’s made up of Explore courses that encourage students to “try on” many different disciplines, and special Quest courses that introduce them to campus life, college expectations and community engagement.
Slagter“Our job as educators is to give students strategies and resources to be successful on campus, and that is a huge part of what we’re doing with USP,” Slagter said. “Every class within the program is intentional. I think our students now understand within their gen ed courses why they are doing it, what they should be learning and how the classes are preparing them to be better students during their undergraduate years in college.”
Slagter said that what UW Oshkosh has done with its general education program is innovative and “light years ahead,” which is why it is so impactful to faculty teaching within the program.
“This program really was designed by the faculty—and with the support of campus administration, particularly the Provost’s Office. The best thing our administration did while we were revamping our general education program was that they told us to dream up the best program we could,” Slagter said.
And so they did.
Classes like Politics of Food, History of Pirates, Geographies of Coffee—and many others—show UW Oshkosh faculty are having fun developing classes to teach to students. Further, the early Quest classes are designed in a way that lets faculty help students navigate their way through the first year of college, something important to student success.
“It’s changing the way we think about teaching,” Slagter said. “I think people really want to teach USP classes. It’s fun. It’s hard, but it’s really fun for us as professors. In a lot of ways, it’s reinvigorated teaching.”
LoiaconoGabe Loiacono, associate director of USP and associate history professor at UW Oshkosh, is one of the professors on campus who created and taught a course within the USP—Ben Franklin, Abigail Adams and Olaudah Equiano: 3 Educations in the 18th Century. He describes his course as a “gentle introduction to college level history,” and really enjoys teaching it.
“For me, what changed my teaching is learning a lot more about my students through the class,” he said. “You really get the benefit in these classes of focusing on first-year issues, which allowed me to learn a lot more about my students and why they are pursuing a college education. I really love that.”
Loiacono said there have been many lessons learned through teaching Quest classes. He said he’s learned to be explicit about how a course connects to other things on campus, that advising is a really important piece of what faculty members do for students and to really listen to where students come from and why they are in college.
“When teaching within the general education program it is really important to let class be led by student curiosity. Teaching should not only be about what I think as the professor, but should be about what they think is important as students, too,” Loiacono said.
Continuous change, evolution
As far as the USP program itself goes, many involved, including Slagter and Loiacono, agree the program is a work in progress—a flexible program with room to grow and change in response to needs.
“The program is here to grow with us and change with our students,” Loiacono said.
Slagter said the first three years of USP have offered a lot of perspective, opportunities, growth and the need to adapt.
“At first, so many instructors had no idea what it was like to teach first-year students,” Slagter said. “At that age and point in their college careers, it takes a while for the students to get into college mentally. In some ways, we are literally teaching them to use college, we’re teaching them what college students do, how they act, what resources they need.”
While that does come with challenges and the need for faculty to continuously adapt, Slagter said she knows the program is offering UW Oshkosh students the information and tools they need to be successful in the future.
“One of the coolest things is that everything employers are saying they want out of our graduates is really built into our curriculum. That is huge,” Slagter said.
KokerJohn Koker, dean of the College of Letters and Science at UW Oshkosh, said about 90 percent of USP classes are taught within COLS; more than 25 departments within the college are involved with the program. Koker has seen many of the faculty members on his team change—as educators and as people— since USP was implemented.
“This program and the classes have really allowed people to work outside of their own departments, which is a big opportunity,” Koker said. “The USP has also allowed faculty to follow their passions in teaching, as related to their disciplines. The flexibility of the program has really allowed faculty to teach what they are interested in.”
Koker said the value of a liberal arts education to undergraduate students is invaluable, and USP helps stress that. In general, a liberal arts education is designed to prepare graduates both for socially valued work and for civic leadership in their society and usually includes curriculum that provides broad exposure to multiple disciplines—something UW Oshkosh prides itself on addressing.
“Of course the major is important, but acquiring broad-based knowledge and developing intellectual skills are an extremely important part of a liberal arts education and earning a bachelor’s degree,” Koker said.
“I hope USP has showed everyone that faculty members don’t have to work alone. They come together to offer a program,” Koker said. “As a student goes through their undergraduate years at UW Oshkosh, we are all working together to get them to graduation.”
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